A firsthand account of how a campaign by the Urban Youth Collaborative preserved crucial funding for student subway passes in New York City in the face of budget cuts. Jorel Moore is a youth leader in Future of Tomorrow and the Urban Youth Collaborative.
Republished with permission from the author and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Voices in Urban Education 30 (Spring 2011), www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/vue30-moor. View the complete issue at www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE.
“SAVE OUR METROCARDS!”
“SAVE OUR METROCARDS!”
“SAVE OUR METROCARDS!”
When you first start going to rallies, it can be surreal. All around you, people are chanting and carrying signs. Looking at their faces, you can tell that they care.
We’re all at this rally because we don’t want to pay $1,000 a year for transportation to get back and forth to our schools. My organizations—Future of Tomorrow, a youth organization that brings together youth from neighboring high schools, and the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC), a citywide coalition made up of five organizations – are here to do what we do best: give the youth a voice.
How UYC works
Sometimes people don’t believe me when I say I’m going to a meeting. Maybe it’s because I’m only seventeen and not a lot of seventeen-year-olds go to meetings.
But I do go to meetings – lots of them. At UYC, our five organizations come together to develop and lead – and hopefully win! – campaigns that affect students from all over New York City. To make change on a citywide level – especially in a city as big as New York – we need to join forces to develop the power we need to be able to influence decisions made about our schools that impact us. Lately, it seems that people like to refer to students as “consumers.” Well, we don’t like that term (Schools are not a business! We are not customers!), but we do believe that because we are the ones actually in the schools that we need to have a big part in the decisions made about our schools. To build the power we need and convince the people who make decisions to listen to us, we organize.
That means more than just holding a protest rally. It means bringing people together who are impacted by an issue, doing research to understand the issue better and how it can be solved, creating demands, and making a campaign plan about how we are going to win what we want. It means testifying at city council meetings, writing blog posts, and talking to the media.
UYC was created in 2005, and we already have some big victories under our belt. One is the creation of Student Success Centers (SSCs). We have played a big part in fighting school budget cuts over the years (this is always a big fight, and we work closely with our allies on that). Just last December, years of hard work paid off when the New York City Council passed a law we fought for that will force the New York City Department of Education and New York Police Department to share data with the public about student arrests, suspensions, and expulsions by race, age, gender, English language learner status, and special education status.
The “Save Our MetroCard” campaign
But right now I want to walk you through a campaign that we did last year. First you need to know a little bit about New York. First off, not many students walk to school. Of my friends, only maybe five of them walk to school. Lots of students go to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Well, in New York the way everybody gets around is the subway. I know that students who live far from their school in rural areas get picked up by yellow school buses. Here in New York we get free or reduced-price MetroCards (MetroCards are passes for the subway).
Before last year I had never really thought about how we get our MetroCards (just like kids in the suburbs probably don’t think about how the bus that picks them up is paid for). Last year I learned more than I ever wanted to know about student MetroCards and who pays for them. In December 2009, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA – they run the subway and bus system) announced that because they were in a severe budget crunch, they would be “phasing out student MetroCards.” The MTA has a board, and the board said that they would be holding hearings about cutting student MetroCards and having a final vote in April. UYC had less than three and a half months to influence their decision.
